vijayjohn wrote:Ájgge is probably the only word in any Saami language that I can remember off the top of my head, and I didn't know what it actually meant until I looked it up just now. I guess now I also know sápmi in Northern Sami.
How did the Lule word for 'time' come to be the only word you can remember in Saami?
One of the few words to make it into other languages from Saami is
joik or
yoik, which comes from a verb in Saami, Northern Saami
juoigat, Lule Saami
juojggat, South Saami
joejkedh, "to depict in song".
Lur wrote:vijayjohn wrote:Lur wrote:That's one of those from old Germanic, right?
Huh? Both those words are indigenous.
They've got plenty of very indigenous words which are from some old Germanic dialect. Also Baltic (I prefer those, Baltic is cute)
Edit: I see wiktionary mentions Germanic *aigwaz, but it's, you know, wiktionary.
The etymology of
ájgge/áigi/aega/aika isn't certain. There's an interesting article titled "The Story of Time: The Etymology of Finnish
aika" in Adam Hyllested's
Word Exchange at the Gates of Europe: Five Millennia of Language Contact. Possible etymologies for Proto-Finnic *
aika are Germanic *
aiwa-/*
aigwaz (time), Baltic *
eigā (way, course, run) (Proto-Baltic *
ei) or Proto-Germanic *
ajuki- (eternal).
Hyllested mentions all of these but prefers Proto-Germanic *
ajuki-; the Estonian Etymological Dictionary prefers Baltic
eigā. Wiktionary, as was already pointed out, prefers *
aigwaz.
Regardless, it seems like what all of the theories agree on is that there were some interesting and somewhat unusual (for Finnic) sound changes involved, and it was already *
aika in Proto-Finnic. In terms of sound changes, it's worth noting that the Estonian genitive singular form is
aja and that Estonian
aasta (year) comes from two forms of *
aika meshed into one, from Proto-Finnic *
aigasta-aika (still
ajastaig and
aastaig in southern Estonia).
There is also Proto-Finnic *
ikä (age, lifetime), which supposedly is an indigenous word, from which came Finnish
ikä (age, lifetime), Estonian
iga (age, lifetime), Estonian
ikka (still, always, all the time), Finnish
ikävä (boring, sad), Northern Saami
jahki (year), Lule Saami
jahke (year), and so on. Some sources indicate that
iga in early Estonian also meant "year".
(Wow, that was quite a rabbit hole!)